I’m feeling sad about having to leave Atlanta behind so early today – next year I’ll seriously have to plan to arrive on Thursday and leave on Monday, so that I really have four full days at the Con.

Here are just some of the highlights from yesterday:

The Red Dwarf Q&A with the voice of the toaster, which had hints about the new series to be filmed this winter.

Getting my picture taken with Autumn Reeser.

The Browncoats Redemption wrap panel. (I still have to watch that DVD.)

Trying to answer Anne McCaffrey trivia questions, (mostly NOT Pern trivia,) and eat a cheeseburger and fries in the same time slot.

The Anne McCaffrey art panel with Michael Whelan, who apparently put Pern onto the New York Times Best-seller list with the cover for “The White Dragon”, which I didn’t know.

A fan panel discussing Chuck and the upcoming new season, which reminded me of a lot of things that I love about that show.

The Doctor Who season six review panel, and asking a question about the missing pieces and unanswered questions of Melody Pond’s life.

The ‘Big Bang Theory’ discussion panel, which had a guy dressed up as Howard Wolowitz in the audience.

One thing that wasn’t particularly a highlight was not getting into the ‘Stars of Buffy’ Q&A, after leaving the Michael Whelan Q&A to wait most of an hour for it. Oh well.

I also thought it was interesting that most of the fans on the Doctor Who review panel had such hate for the little Amy Pond intro spiel on the North American broadcasts this season. (I think it originated with BBC America, but the Space channel in Canada airs it too.) They really seemed offended about how it introduced the Doctor as ‘The Imaginary Friend.’

Myself, I don’t really think that intro is necessary, but I rather like it anyway – mostly as a little recap of some of the basics of the current state of canon for anybody who’s checking out a new episode and needs those basics. “I ran away with him, and we’ve been running ever since.” Come on – what’s wrong with that?

Left yesterday morning at 7am to go to the airport. Flew through Washington briefly, got to Atlanta, took a shared shuttle to the Holiday Inn, checked in and immediately got set to go register at the Convention. By 4 in the afternoon I had my badge – there was almost no line-up for pre-registers by then.

Then I spent several hours running around, getting a good sense of the five host hotels and where they were in relation to each other – at least, I hope it’s a fairly good sense. Dragon*Con is a bit new to me, in that though it’s a bigger con than Fan Expo is, it doesn’t feel exactly like the commercial ‘floor cons’, such as Fan Expo or Wizard World. Instead, it’s a giant version of a fan ‘hotel con’ like Polaris or Ad Astra – hence, why it needs five host hotels, I guess.

I dropped by the Whedonverse fan track room in the middle of a panel about absolute power corrupting in Joss Whedon shows, got bored and went on more exploring, and got four autographed pictures:

Laura Vandervoort

Tahmoh Penikett

Autumn Reeser

Michael Rosenbaum

I could have gotten autographs from James Marsters and Felicia Day too – but I had left the comics that I want them to sign back at the Holiday Inn! Oh well, try today I guess.Read the rest of this entry »